[python] How to write a confusion matrix in Python?

A Dependency Free Multiclass Confusion Matrix

# A Simple Confusion Matrix Implementation
def confusionmatrix(actual, predicted, normalize = False):
    """
    Generate a confusion matrix for multiple classification
    @params:
        actual      - a list of integers or strings for known classes
        predicted   - a list of integers or strings for predicted classes
        normalize   - optional boolean for matrix normalization
    @return:
        matrix      - a 2-dimensional list of pairwise counts
    """
    unique = sorted(set(actual))
    matrix = [[0 for _ in unique] for _ in unique]
    imap   = {key: i for i, key in enumerate(unique)}
    # Generate Confusion Matrix
    for p, a in zip(predicted, actual):
        matrix[imap[p]][imap[a]] += 1
    # Matrix Normalization
    if normalize:
        sigma = sum([sum(matrix[imap[i]]) for i in unique])
        matrix = [row for row in map(lambda i: list(map(lambda j: j / sigma, i)), matrix)]
    return matrix

The approach here is to pair up the unique classes found in the actual vector into a 2-dimensional list. From there, we simply iterate through the zipped actual and predicted vectors and populate the counts using the indices to access the matrix positions.

Usage

cm = confusionmatrix(
    [1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1], # actual
    [0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 2, 2, 0, 2]  # predicted
)

# And The Output
print(cm)
[[2, 1, 0], [0, 2, 1], [1, 2, 1]]

Note: the actual classes are along the columns and the predicted classes are along the rows.

# Actual
# 0  1  2
  #  #  #   
[[2, 1, 0], # 0
 [0, 2, 1], # 1  Predicted
 [1, 2, 1]] # 2

Class Names Can be Strings or Integers

cm = confusionmatrix(
    ["B", "B", "C", "A", "B", "B", "C", "A", "A", "B"], # actual
    ["A", "B", "B", "A", "C", "B", "C", "C", "A", "C"]  # predicted
)

# And The Output
print(cm)
[[2, 1, 0], [0, 2, 1], [1, 2, 1]]

You Can Also Return The Matrix With Proportions (Normalization)

cm = confusionmatrix(
    ["B", "B", "C", "A", "B", "B", "C", "A", "A", "B"], # actual
    ["A", "B", "B", "A", "C", "B", "C", "C", "A", "C"], # predicted
    normalize = True
)

# And The Output
print(cm)
[[0.2, 0.1, 0.0], [0.0, 0.2, 0.1], [0.1, 0.2, 0.1]]

A More Robust Solution

Since writing this post, I've updated my library implementation to be a class that uses a confusion matrix representation internally to compute statistics, in addition to pretty printing the confusion matrix itself. See this Gist.

Example Usage

# Actual & Predicted Classes
actual      = ["A", "B", "C", "C", "B", "C", "C", "B", "A", "A", "B", "A", "B", "C", "A", "B", "C"]
predicted   = ["A", "B", "B", "C", "A", "C", "A", "B", "C", "A", "B", "B", "B", "C", "A", "A", "C"]

# Initialize Performance Class
performance = Performance(actual, predicted)

# Print Confusion Matrix
performance.tabulate()

With the output:

===================================
        A?      B?      C?

A?      3       2       1

B?      1       4       1

C?      1       0       4

Note: class? = Predicted, class? = Actual
===================================

And for the normalized matrix:

# Print Normalized Confusion Matrix
performance.tabulate(normalized = True)

With the normalized output:

===================================
        A?      B?      C?

A?      17.65%  11.76%  5.88%

B?      5.88%   23.53%  5.88%

C?      5.88%   0.00%   23.53%

Note: class? = Predicted, class? = Actual
===================================